The
Court of Appeal for this district yesterday upheld a preliminary injunction,
obtained by the City of Los Angeles,barring the marketing or further development of a marijuana delivery
app.

Div. Five, in an opinion by Justice Lamar Baker, found that
retired Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert H. O’Brien, sitting on
assignment, correctly found that the city is apt to ultimately prevail in the
matter.

The decision keeps in place O’Brien’s Dec. 23, 2014 order
barring Michael Joseph Pycher, Roddy Radnia, and their company, Nestdrop,
LLC, from providing a marjuana delivery service in
the City of Los Angeles, through their Nestdrop
smartphone app. The preliminay injunction did not
affect the complanty’s alcohol delivery service.

Download link for
Nestdrop on Google.com

Meanwhile, Nestdrop continues to
connect marijuana users with cultivators in other geographic areas. The Google
store offers the app for dfownloading and notes:

“Available in San Francisco/Orange
County/Oceanside/Pasadena/Stockton/Portland/Seattle.”

Proposition
D

The controversy in the City of Los Angeles’ action centers on an
interpretation of Proposition D, enacted by voters in 2013. While banning
marijuana businesses, it accords grandfathered status to medical marijuana
businesses in existence as of Sept. 14, 2007 which registered with the city,
have continually operated at the same location, and meet other criteria.

Baker wrote:

“Defendants argue Proposition D permits medical marijuana
dispensaries that are entitled to limited immunity under the ordinance to
deliver marijuana to qualified patients by vehicle.If that interpretation is correct, defendants
maintain the City has not shown a likelihood of success on the merits because
the City did not proffer sufficient evidence to show defendants intended to
facilitate deliveries of marijuana from what defendants knew to be non-immune
businesses. The City counters that defendants misinterpret Proposition D, and
that properly read, the ordinance prohibits any vehicle delivery of marijuana
to patients (except by a designated primary caregiver).The City gets the better of the argument:
Proposition D does prohibit virtually all deliveries of marijuana by vehicle,
and the City has therefore shown it is likely to succeed in its suit against
defendants on an aiding and abetting theory.”

Treatment
of ‘Vehicles’

Under Proposition D, a “medical marijuana business” is defined
in terms of a physical location or a “vehicle or other mode of
transportation...which is used to transport, distribute, deliver, or give away
marijuana to a qualified patient, a person with an identification card, or a
primary caregiver.”

(By statute, a “qualified patient” is a person legally entitled
to use medical marijuana but who has not obtained an identification card, and a
“primary caregiver” is someone “who has consistently assumed responsibility for
the housing, health, or safety” of the permissible marijuana user.)

Proposition D generally prohibits use of a vehicle in connection
with delivery of marjuana, except that it permits “a
primary caregiver to transport, distribute, deliver, or give away marijuana to
a qualified patient or person with an identification card who has designated
the individual as a primary caregiver.”

Baker wrote:

“That Proposition D expressly addresses how vehicles should be
treated under the ordinance, and indeed makes a very limited exception to permit
vehicle delivery of medical marijuana to patients by their designated primary
caregiver..., belies defendants’ contention that Proposition D implicitly
treats vehicle delivery as a permissible activity for a business that enjoys
limited immunity at a fixed location.

“To be sure, there are more direct ways in which the drafters of
Proposition D could have conveyed the intention to ban vehicle delivery of
medical marijuana by otherwise immune businesses.A single sentence so stating would
suffice.But we do not discard a meaning
that is apparent upon review of a text merely because additional wordsmithing
might have produced a more elegant phrasing.”